NetBSD 7.0 is released
The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 7.0, the fifteenth major
release of the NetBSD operating system.
The last release is quite some time ago, but given a philosophy of
"it is ready when it is ready" and the amount of work that
went into it, this is a very good reason to celebrate!

NetBSD 6.1 and 6.0.2 released
Following NetBSD's release scheme, two new releases are available now.
NetBSD 6.1 is the next release from the netbsd-6 release, and it
contains security fixes, bug fixes and some new feature.
NetBSD 6.0.2 is the second stability update for NetBSD 6.0, and
it also contains bugfixes and security fixes, but no new features.
See
the release map graph
on the NetBSD website for a visual representation of the relationship between releases.
Major news in 6.1 include:

... plus numerous bugfixes.
For more details see the release notes of
NetBSD 6.1
and
NetBSD 6.0.2.
NetBSD is a volunteer project ran by a non-profit organization
and with no commercial backing. As such, your donations are very important
to the project, and can fund developing in various areas, including:

Improving network stack concurrency and performance.

Development of modern file systems and improvement of existing ones.

Features which are useful in embedded environments, such as high resolution timers and execute in place (XIP) support.

Automatic testing and quality assurance.

For more information about donating, visit
http://www.NetBSD.org/donations/
The NetBSD Foundation is a 501(c)(3) organization in the US, and donations may be tax deductible.

NetBSD 5.1.2 released
Soren Jacobsen from NetBSD's release engineering team
announced on the NetBSD blog:
``On behalf of the NetBSD developers, I am pleased to announce that NetBSD 5.1.2 is now available for download. NetBSD 5.1.2 is the second critical/security update of the NetBSD 5.1 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed critical for security or stability reasons. All users are encouraged to upgrade.
For full details, please see the 5.1.2 release notes.
To download 5.1.2, see http://www.NetBSD.org/mirrors/''

Note that the NetBSD x.x.x releases only contain security
and critical bug fixes over the last full release (5.0).
The number is kept down to improve stability.
More updates and changes are available on the NetBSD x.x
releases and their related branches, e.g. netbsd-5.
(see also)

Please help us test this release candidate as much as possible.
Remember, any feedback is good feedback. We'd love to hear from you,
whether you've got a complaint or a compliment. That said, we hope your
feedback is positive, as we would like this to be the final release
candidate before 5.1. ''

Those of you who prefer to build from source can continue to follow the
netbsd-5 branch, but the netbsd-5-1-RC2 tag is available as well.

See src/doc/CHANGES-5.1 for the list of changes from RC1 to RC2.

Please help us test this and any upcoming release candidates as much as
possible. Remember, any feedback is good feedback. We'd love to hear
from you, whether you've got a complaint or a compliment. ''

NetBSD 5.0: Overview and Benchmarks
Andrew Doran has made an overview of NetBSD 5.0,
available as HTML and
PDF,
which includes a general description of what
NetBSD is, what's new in 5.0 and what is important
for users of workstations, servers and embedded apps as well
as for developers and hobbyists. Besires the lists of features,
the most interesting part is a number of benchmarks
that show that NetBSD can compare well to FreeBSD
and Linux (by usually beating them 8-).
A list of possible features for NetBSD 6.0 concludes.

NetBSD 5.0 release announcementNetBSD 5.0 is released:
``NetBSD 5.0 features greatly improved performance and scalability on modern multiprocessor (SMP) and multi-core systems. Multi-threaded applications can now efficiently make use of more than one CPU or core, and system performance is much better under I/O and network load.

In addition to scalability and performance improvements, a significant number of major features have been added. Some highlights are: a preview of metadata journaling for FFS file systems (known as WAPBL), the jemalloc memory allocator, X.Org instead of XFree86 on a number of ports, the Power Management Framework, ACPI suspend/resume support on many laptops, write support for UDF file systems, the Automated Testing Framework, the Runnable Userspace Meta Program framework, Xen 3.3 support for both i386 and amd64, POSIX message queues and asynchronous I/O, and many new hardware device drivers. For all the details, see
the full release notes. ''

Citing from the release announcement, ``ISO images can be downloaded using BitTorrent, and we encourage users
who wish to install via ISO images to take advantage of this, as the
images are very well seeded at
http://www.NetBSD.org/mirrors/torrents/

Complete source and binaries for NetBSD 5.0 are available for download
at many sites around the world. A list of download sites providing FTP,
AnonCVS, and other services may be found at:
http://www.NetBSD.org/mirrors/

NetBSD 5.0 Release Candidate 4 available
Soren Jacobsen
writes:
``Today, we have two things to be happy about. First, the fourth release
candidate of NetBSD 5.0 is available for download. Second, this
announcement, like RC3's, coincides with an important birthday: that of
Billy West.

Below are some highlighted changes since RC3:

Added the RLIMIT_AS resource, which limits the total address space
available to processes.

Improved NFS server stability

FFS improvements

A fix for a pf(4) DoS

re(4) now works with the RealTek 8111C, which is found on many current
motherboards with Intel chipsets

NetBSD 5.0_RC3 binaries available for download
Soren Jacobsen from the NetBSD release engineering team
wrote on Sat, 21st of March 2009:
``Today, on the 16th birthday of NetBSD, I have the pleasure of announcing
the availability of NetBSD 5.0_RC3.
Below are some highlighted changes since RC2:

Considerable improvements to WAPBL.

Further X.Org refinements, including switching sgimips to X.Org.

Scheduler Activations support is now disabled by default in sysctl.conf.

ddb.onpanic is now set to 1 in the kernel by default, but 0 in
sysctl.conf. This avoids trying to dump if a crash occurs during the
install phase.

First Release Candidat for NetBSD 5.0 released
NetBSD 5.0 is progressing towards a release, and
a first release candidat
was released this week.

Probably the two most significant improvements in NetBSD 5.0
will be journalling for UFS (nore more fsck, yai!) and
the move from XFree to X.org.
Download
now, or have a look at the
changes in 5.0
if you need more reasons to check it out.